Frog Legs Revisited

If I were to do this Frog Legs memoir right, I’d pull out the crate of old Journals and look up every article we ran on the band, but the crate is in the closet, under the Christmas decorations, behind the litter box, so that’s not happening.

The original cassette cover.

This is what I recall. I had a fax machine/answering machine combo in my apartment/Journal office, and I kept the ringer turned off so calls during the night or early morning would not wake me. This was before email was commonly used, and I wanted an easy way for my readers to send in their comments and letters. I assumed putting pen to paper might be too challenging, and musicians cannot afford stamps, but they can talk in the middle of the night. I was right. Each morning I had several spoken letters to transcribe for the popular letters to the editor page.

There was one frequent caller that, instead of comments on the local music scene, told acid trip type

stories that would always end with the admonition to go see Frog Legs. Sometimes two people were on the line during these messages and they would perform a play. I was intrigued. It was an effective way to get a reporter's attention. So, one night when I was on my way to a more important show, I dashed into Twisters to catch part of their set and was instantly blown away.

Their ambition in ’94 was to make the jump to the big time, which at that time was leaving Grace Street for Shockoe Bottom. Could I help? I could. I encountered a sort of drunk Chuck Wrenn wandering around the 17th Street Farmers’ Market at 2 in the morning one night. Tuesday was a slow night at his club, Moondance. I said, give me every Tuesday for Frog Legs. I guarantee you a crowd. He said okay. I called in every favor, twisted every arm, called everyone I knew, to guarantee at least someone showed up for that first show. I got people there. Each following Tuesday night went better and soon Moondance was the place to be on Tuesdays, not only to see the band, but to see each other. The gang’s all here. We went through wild dance nights, nights with choir robes, nights when no one knew where Wrenn was. But when the band started, he would pop out from under the Moondance stage. How and when did he get under it?

And yes, the legend you've heard elsewhere was true. Tom would quietly borrow a quarter from someone in the audience before the show and use it as a pick.

I don’t recall how long this went on, it seems like years, but probably was less than one. At some point the band wanted to get paid, which wasn’t part of the original deal. I am good at publicity, not at making money. Moondance didn’t want to hurt its food and beer sales by charging a cover on a Tuesday. The Journal’s gushing coverage became more of an embarrassment to the band than a benefit. We followed them to Crazy Charlie’s for a series of great shows. They had two cassettes out and did a CD, but the CD had new songs on it that the fan base wasn’t familiar with, and the few carry-overs were homogenized in the studio. The excitement of the live show didn’t carry over to the CD, and we had to give it a thumbs down, which didn’t endear us to their new management. Dave Matthews was able to preserve their stage sound on their first CD, but few other local bands got that kind of protection from their management. They listen to the studio engineers who want them to sound more like what’s currently selling.

Then they made – in our opinion – a fatal mistake by going with East Coast Entertainment on the college frat house circuit on tour through the mid-South. Frog Legs is not a frat band. Drunk frat boys don’t want their dates being distracted by Wrenn Mangum’s stage antics, and they didn’t appreciate Tom Illmensee’s amazing artistry on the guitar. They didn’t know the music from the magical first two cassettes. Life on the road for a young , unknown band is boring and costly. There’s no real money to be made. You are away from friends and family, and away from the hometown fans who know and appreciate you. Fighting Gravity was the perfect package for frat houses, and even they didn’t become famous after years and years on the road.

This suspicion was confirmed to me at a Battle of the Bands at Sunset Grill where I was one of the judges along with girls from East Coast Entertainment. I asked them how Frog Legs was doing, and they said the feedback from the frats was not good.

So ended Frog Legs circa 1997. Plus, the bass player moved away. Families and children happen. Steady jobs were needed. Wrenn developed a young Elvis act that expanded into an Elvis, Johnny Cash, rockabilly act that plays around the state five to 10 shows a month. The three remaining members came together for occasional local shows as Bone Anchor. Fifteen years go by. (Does anyone remember the original bassist? I do. He was either a med student or a dental student at MCV, the Pete Best of Frog Legs.)

Facebook, which replaced the Journal as a means of getting the word out about bands, told me there was going to be a last reunion show because Tom was moving overseas with his family. Bone Anchor would cease, too, and since Turtle was coming in from Crozet for the going away party, why not play a last show?

All the bands at the new, spacious Broadberry club near Boulevard and Broad would be interconnected. Johnny Cecka and the Jailswerves has Morgan and Tom in it, then Frog Legs, then Herro Sugar, a surprisingly excellent band of recent high school graduates – the bass player is Tom’s own son – and then Bone Anchor.

I seldom go out anymore, but this required an appearance. There were just as many familiar faces in the audience, and it was shocking how little the band had changed in appearance in 20 years. I guess the trip from age 20 to 40 is less physically transforming than the one from 40 to 60, which I’m on. Wrenn still worked the room before each set, sincerely thanking everyone for coming. He didn’t wear the little brown vest over the bare chest, and they didn’t play “Human Cannonball” or “Rubber Chicken,” but we did get “Midnight Radio” and memories of Batman underoos. Tom played sitting down, not in choir robes as he once did, but in a suit as he later did, and was – as always – completely oblivious to Wrenn’s antics on stage. We got the wiggle worm on the floor, and even the hand stand. There was plenty of sweat flying. 

You can probably find lots of videos of this show on Facebook and YouTube. At least a third of the audience was recording it on their phones or cameras, another reason a printed monthly newspaper is no longer necessary to share the news about great local bands. If you haven’t been, the Broadberry is a nice room, longer than it is wide, with seating in the back and plenty of room to see the band in the front. I parked across the street at the Children’s Museum and didn’t get towed or ticketed, or asked to pay a fee to park there, calamities that crushed the Shockoe Bottom scene.

My Interview with Dave Brockie

From the June 1995 Richmond Music Journal

Dave Brockie in his Slave Pit office

I was summoned to the Slave Pit. Despite the interest of other writers in doing the Gwar story, the band wants the mothership to handle the invasion. And why not? Gwar, to Richmond’s seeming embarrassment, is the biggest band in town. They are bigger than Single Bullet Theory, they are bigger than Ten Ten, they are more successful than anyone you want to name from here.

Who else has a CD available through the Columbia Record Club? Who else had a Grammy-nominated video? Who else is going on widely successful world tours? Who else gets on Beavis and Butthead? But they are a bastard child, local but not talked about. They are our secret shame.

Head Gwarster Dave Brockie peppers his phone conversation with belches, so I decide showering before reporting for duty at the Slave Pit would be unnecessary. I drive to the unpublicized, unmarked building on the north side of town and, as instructed, lean on my horn for a couple of loud blasts.

Dobermans run to the fence. A head peers down at me from the window. Someone comes to the door and interrogates me. Despite the building’s ramshackle appearance, there are intercom phones on the wall. The great man himself is informed of my arrival. I am ushered upstairs, where Brockie is holding court like any corporate executive in a simply furnished room full of electronics, printers, fax machines, phones, stereos, desktop computer, drafting board. It is orderly without being anal. Brockie, fielding phone calls and faxes like a typical CEO, lets loose a loud fart which begins the interview.

I thought what we’d do first is what’s going on with Gwar now, what’s here, and then go back in time to your days at VCU. Is that where it all started? 

Where what started?

Well, Death Piggy. Wasn’t that the first band you were in?
The first band was Nuclear Dogshit when I was in the 9th grade. It was a cool band, a punk band. I was 14 years old.

But what was the first band that put you on the map?

Photo by William Pickett, Death Piggy

Death Piggy was the first band people liked. I was in a band in high school called Yams on Wheels. We were so fucked up. It was a piano and fiddle. I was in a bunch of loser bands before Death Piggy. I was in the Flashbacks my first year in college. It sucked. One set was all hardcore. which I had written, and the other set was Police covers the other two guys insisted on playing. I was living in Farmville, going to Longwood College. I was so freaked out when I got out of high school, I went to the first college I applied to. I didn’t even give it a thought.

In Farmville, the only thing to do on the weekend was drive down to Richmond. It was the closest thing to culture within 100 miles. Wow, VCU! Lots of chicks here! Lots of punk rockers! There were none in Farmville. This was 10 years ago before punk became the pussified fashion it is now. You could get your ass kicked quite literally every day of your life back then if you walked your talk, and I did. I’m proud of that. I’m proud of getting kicked in the head continually! Look at this nose!

It’s crooked!
Eight times it’s been broken. I’m proud of the blows I took. I started hanging out with the local hardcore scene. I immediately ran into the Richmond wall of, “Oh, you’re not from here? You suck!”

Where are you from?
Northern Virginia and Canada. I subtracted myself from the scene here a long time ago. I have little interest in playing shows here except Gwar and X-Cops now. But I used to do little performance things, the F-Minus Art Players, little plays. I used to love to do stuff like that in Richmond, but it’s such a pissy attitude now.

People I respected right off the bat, people like Mike Rodriguez, Penn Rollins, were such dicks to me when I moved here and I’ll never forget it. I had weird shit and dressed up. I had a wind-up cow. It took people a long time to even pretend to like me. But they can all suck my dick.

Years ago I realized there’s an entire world out there. The whole world doesn’t focus around Richmond. That’s an attitude left from all the rich, white bastards who run this country. They think this place is special because it’s near Jamestown, we settled the states here, we fucked the Indians in the ass from here, the CIA’s in Fairfax, DC’s right up the road. That makes me hate this state more than anything in the fucking world and I think it’s funny that Gwar grows like a malignant fucking herpes in their midst.

Then why do you stay here?!
Because I travel six to eight months a year, but I’d be out of here in a fucking heartbeat if I could. This town has so many shitty, narrow-minded fucking attitudes. I’m not even talking about the music scene, I’m talking about the governor! The government! The ABC! This whole thing about the penis thing! Well, I have a little perspective on that matter. I’ve seen it happen six or seven times. This time it went to a new level. They actually had a hearing about it. I’ve seen clubs get burned to the ground because of who knows why? VCU. They’ll be after us over here now, I know they will.

Well, aren’t you big enough to relocate somewhere else?
We could, but everyone’s family lives around here. It’s not a money thing, it’s a family thing. People’s mothers are starting to get old, starting to die. A lot of people don’t want to move to Los Angeles. They need to take care of their families. Gwar cares about their mothers!

I’m going to Los Angeles tomorrow to slap the monkeys, knob-twiddlers, and parasites into line, the ones who rely on the artists to make tons of cash for them. Look at our calendar! All this blue is X-cops touring, all this red is Gwar touring! Nine months of touring! That’s why I can handle living in Richmond. I have a great studio here. I don’t generally go out. People usually ignore me or ask me stupid questions. I’m such a pariah around here, it’s gross.

What do people ask you?
Are you on crack? That’s a big one. Everyone thinks I’m on crack. All I do is work on my art.

I went down to the ODC one night with Heavy Duty, a motherfucker from New York who has more power in his pinkie finger than every fucking, half-assed dipshit in this town put together, and they wouldn’t fucking let us in because we didn’t have our IDs!

I talked to Tommy Rodriquez about getting the X-Cops on a show and he went, “Hfffffff!” like I had asked him to come over and summon Satan with me! The Vapor Rhinos suck! The Beex are the only good band; I love the Beex. They have more balls than any band ever will. The Vapor Rhinos can suck my dick. They’ll never be anything. Penn Rollins is my friend now, but all those guys who thought I was a fucking fuck-up can all kiss my ass, so fucking hard. That’s why we formed Death Piggy!

I was in the hardcore DC scene for years. I was there when it started. I saw Henry Rollins’ old band, SOA even before he was in Black Flag. I know what was going on. I was already sick to death of that straight-edged attitude, being beaten up for slamming the wrong way. I moved to Richmond and it was cool, but because I had such a weird attitude, a wind-up cow, would pour mayonnaise down their pants, people dissed me hard.

I get it all the time still. People are so jealous of what we’ve achieved. I just want to fucking spit in Peter Bell’s face. Who the fuck is he? I’m a Grammy-nominated musician! I have toured the world eight times now. He can suck my dick in hell for eternity!

People say do you really use musicians in Gwar? We’ve sold half a million records, asshole! Projects are the lifeblood of this organization. I have X-Cops, Gwar, solo projects, spoken word, surrealist histories, sort of Ween meets Tom Waite. It’s rad! It’s all about music, man! People ought to open up their fucking minds and see it!

In Richmond, the scene will always be a bitter, fucking grunge shithole, the same attitudes their fathers and the cops have. My advice to any musician who is worth a shit is to get out of town. The ABC has shut down every club.

I have a lot of friends and we do our art. But I got real disaffected with the scene and stopped going out. I read about it in the Journal now. There’s new good bands out there that I’m missing, but I’m too busy making my own music. I love Avail, I love Donkey Balls, I love Frog Legs. I have their tapes and they rule! They’re very creative! I wish I had more time to support those bands. People will come out in force for that shit. Avail is doing really fucking good.

How many people are working here?
This is a professional punk rock complex we’ve got, eight bands practice here. Twelve to 30 people work here, depending on the projects. We’re working on three music videos now, two for Gwar and one for the X-Cops, two 48-page, full color graphic novels, self-published, self-distributed. We have two world tours which will stretch into 1996. We have a T-shirt shop. We’ve got the shit! This building is an armed fortress of artistic rebellion and social reform!

If anyone ever doubted us when we said we were going to make Gwar last a million years, they should finally realize we were not fucking around. Gwar will outlive us. No matter what happens, those half a million records will exist after I’m dead. Not just Gwar, all this other stuff, and everything we make, we make because we want to fuck with the system. We are their sworn enemies and this is war. The Oklahoma federal building bombing is not going to be taken lightly and I’m fucking pissed off about it.

Who’s side are you on?
I’m not on anyone’s side, but I’m very interested in why they set that bomb off. What are they trying to prove? The government will not let us know why they did it, but it was revenge.

I’m a pacifist, a follower of Gandhi. I don’t believe that might is right. I don’t believe physical power is the bottom line, but it is in their world and that’s what I’m dedicated to destroy. The federal building in Oklahoma City was used as a staging area for the whole Waco tragedy. The morning they blew it up was the second anniversary of the botched raid. That morning, guys in paramilitary outfits laid a marker at the Waco site.

The Branch Davidians did not kill their own children. The federal government killed those people on purpose or they fucked up so bad, it was an accident. But I think they did it on purpose. Why didn’t they have a fire truck around? But that doesn’t give anyone the right to blow up the federal building.

But it shows you just how fucked up things are. The government murdered John F. Kennedy, and they’re doing it more and more, and one day they’re going to come for you unless you get in line and spend your life doing something you hate, which 90 percent of the people have to do.
  
We’re so lucky! That’s why we want to be artists! We want to be free! And they don’t want us to be free! I hate them with every fucking ounce of my life. I hate them so much, I would die, but not violently. I’m going to work myself to death with a smile on my face. These are our weapons of war, albums, ideas, comic books! We don’t need guns! We have pies, not bombs! That’s our war! When everyone finally realizes it, we’re going to get into politics. We’re already laying the groundwork. We will offer the people an alternative. We will create a populist movement in this country. It will knock their socks off.

You’re going to get into politics?!
Not now. But we’re going to use the same tactics the anti-abortionists use. We will bring people together literally with ducktape and chains, immobilize them, destroy their perfect schedules, terrorize them with humor, make a big joke out it and the joke will be on them because they will look so foolish trying to stop our movement. We’ll fight cops with squirt guns and pies, and when they arrest us, we’ll go limp and tape ourselves all together and make it as expensive as possible to fuck with us and we’ll never use violence.

McNamara said that would have stopped the Vietnam war, if everyone just laid down around the Pentagon.

I agree. We see our own war dead, but we don’t see the other side.

Tim McVeigh was the kid on the street who organized the haunted house! That tells me he was a smart kid, but when he went into the military, he got fucked, just like my dad got fucked. My father got shot in World War II; my mom was buried alive for four days in a building in London. War is still a legitimate means of solving our problems! Fuck that! I may have a tank on my door and the name of my band is Gwar, but I hate war. It’s the most sophisticated symbol of mindless stupidity we have. You don’t need war, you don’t need guns.

Don’t you have a gun?
I don’t want to have a gun. I wish I didn’t feel the need for a gun. I almost got carjacked the day of the Flood Zone show. People break into my house. I let “Style” print a picture of me with the gun for one reason, don’t come over to my house! The last thing I want to do is kill someone, but I would do it in a heartbeat if someone I loved was about to get hurt. I’d blow their fucking heads off. But it sucks! I think it sucks that I can’t ride my bike home at night! I think it sucks that I can’t have female friends come visit me at my apartment at night because they might get attacked.

Where do you live?
Around Boulevard and Cary. That neighborhood has gone to shit!

The phone rings again, Brockie is distracted and starts talking about his current favorite band, Thin Lizzy. We leave for the building tour, starting with the computer room.

“We’re changing the face of Slave Pit graphics,” Brockie says proudly. A color drawing is printing out. “We scan in a black and white drawing for the comic and color it in the computer. It has 16 million colors! We’ve only used 15 million!”

An entire colorized comic can be stored on a computer disk and mailed off to a printing plant in Texas for production and distribution. The one I’m looking out will be out in July. They do their own posters by computer, too. There’s a graphics lab I don’t see because people are doing secret things inside. Downstairs, Brockie walks into the rehearsal room and announces he’s fired someone. Everyone laughs.

“You can’t fire anyone!”

“I know I can’t! I was just giving my opinion.” Everyone laughs more.

“He’s going to change the locks!” The band thinks they should make a family tree of all the people who came out of Gwar and went into other bands, and the bands that came out of those.

“Kepone, Alter-natives, there’s tons.”

The foyer is full of black dirtbikes, Gwar mode of transportation. There’s a large, typically bare, but strangely clean, kitchen area, and a big calendar which bespeaks organization. Whoever feeds the dogs has to put an X on the calendar to show it’s been done.

The video production room has a professional looking blue wall, lots of squishy and pointy sculpture in progress, walls of fiberglass castle wall, a heating room where costume parts are cooking, and a loft loaded with wardrobe, heads and body parts. It looks like Hollywood. It’s astounding.

Brockie says their next album is “Rag-na-rok, an ancient Norse legend about the last day of the world, the end of the gods. We developed the music and idea. Cardinal Sin, an intergalactic KKK imperial wizard, a symbol of fascism and hatred with religious overtones, cruises through the universe, worship me or die!”

Brockie runs through the story while the band practices ominous noises in the background.

“We wanted to create a video with this character. A comet is coming to hit the earth Dec. 31, 1999. We’re artists! People have been prophesizing for hundreds of years and we want to take advantage of it. The comet is going to obliviate the earth, everyone will die. Gwar says cool, then they’ll ride back. They have a huge party as the comet gets closer, then when it gets here, it’s Cardinal Sin’s warship! We wrote the music along that theme. We’re not narrating the story but going with the ideas in that story, hating everything Cardinal Sin symbolizes. When you listen to Gwar’s music, you don’t have to know a damn thing about Gwar. The music is about radical change in this world.”

Brockie prepares a letter for me to give to The Ramones that night with his gift, Hitler’s head. He wants it presented to Joey Ramone.

“If I’m being a dick, tell me, get in my face, I need it,” Brockie tells one of the  minions he had yelled at earlier. He gives me Hitler’s head.

“Tell the Ramones, their crew and their bimbos to come by and see us,” he says, escorting me to my car like any proper gentleman would. “Take care,” he waves, adding, “Don’t you keep Hitler’s head for yourself or it will come alive! You’ll wake up and it’ll be eating your pussy!”

I put Hitler’s head on the car seat and cringe. No better warning could have been given. I used to get nightmares from “Reanimator.” But that was years ago. I’ve changed. Doing the Journal for two years can change you, being in the Slave Pit briefly can change you. Driving home, I start having sexual fantasies about Hitler’s head. At the stoplights, I gaze at him on the car seat. I stick my finger in his mouth.

-- Mariane Matera

My First Gwar Show

From the October 1994 Richmond Music Journal.

It's 45 minutes past 8 o'clock "doors" and there's a line down the block outside the Flood Zone. The first band, X-Cops, doesn’t come on until 9:43 and even though the Slave Pit, command central for Gwar, said Gwar was going on promptly at 11 because it's an all-ages show, it's closer to midnight when they do. By then I'm not timing anything anymore because I'm totally engrossed in a spectacle that's going to end with Dave Brockie naked on stage.

The next four hours are like rough seas on the Carnival Cruise Line. I hang on the rail the whole time because if I move, I lose my spot, and it's a good spot, scientifically selected in advance by guys from Mystic Biscuits and Digits who studied the terrain based on previous Gwar shows, computing the exact distance you need to see yet not get slimed.

Their computations are on the mark. Toward the end of the show when Brockie points a hose upward, we can see the haze of red droplets heading our way, but they dissipate before impact.

X-Cops play first in order to give them time to change into their Gwar costumes. Their music is loud with titles like “Paddy Wagon Rape.” They heap abuse on the restless youth of America jammed six-deep at the barricade. Guys are brought up on stage and clubbed until their faces are bloody (an illusion, although I can’t tell how they’re doing it). The keyboard player in charge of ominous noises stays back at the soundboard.

Another guy is beat up and shot to “You Fucked Up.” We can make out the lyrics to that song. They go “you fucked up.” X-Cops leaves the stage at 10:23 and Hose Got Cable comes on at 10:37, getting us momentarily excited by tuning up to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But then they don’t cover any Nirvana. What sounds like a warm-up turns out to be their first song, one that never seems to quite get started. They play with their backs to the audience. At one point the drum kit needs an emergency application of a lot of Scotch tape.

The crowd at the barricade is now 21 bodies deep and 20 wide in anticipation of Gwar, four-deep at the upstairs rails. We spot members of Letters from Earth and Bucket in the crowd, but we can’t move to see what other local bands are in the hall. The comic book-sci fi crowd is down on the first floor in force. Hose Got Cable has broken one of its guitars to bits. They go off at 11:12.

“How much did they suck? Did they suck? They sucked,” the Digits-Mystic Biscuits contingent around me decides.

After another long break, Gwar finally takes the stage in their monster costumes, their stagehands scurrying around naked except for dicks-on-steroids cod pieces.

“This is the biggest collection of losers since the Nuremberg Trials,” they announce to the devoted, who I bet don’t know what the Nuremberg Trials were. As Oderus Urungus sings to loud music, he moves frequently to the edge of the stage so eager hands can bat at his fierce looking, yard-long penis.

Somebody is disemboweled and intestines are ripped out and eaten. Somebody’s head is split open and their brains are eaten. Oderus shoots a stream of green liquid out of his penis. None of it is particularly gross because it’s so obviously fake, like Pee Wee Herman Meets Night of the Living Dead, but as theater of the absurd, it is vastly entertaining nonetheless.

If Hose Got Cable, then Gwar Got Hose. There’s ample Galligar-Gwar warning because you can see the stagehands plug in the costumes when a squirt-down is next in the script. But tonight the script has gone wrong. Being a first-time Gwar attendee, I could not tell, but Gwar veterans tell me later the show went badly amiss. Brockie is obviously frustrated.

“I made one mistake and now I have to suffer for the rest of the set?” he says to the band. Something isn’t functioning. But the show keeps rocking to Brockie’s repeated confessions that he has deviated from the script and is ad-libbing.

Three Neo-Nazi skinheads are decapitated and blood spurts out of their necks. Then Slymenstra Hymen impresses the hell out of me by doing a fire dance without burning her hair off or setting the Flood Zone stage ablaze. Smoke pours through the hall.

She rips a gigantic bloody tampon out of her crotch and tosses it into the crowd, which tosses it back. Then she has one of those Maximum MaxiPad Heavy Days right on the stage in one cascading splat and breathes fire. The entire Flood Zone has literally heated up. You can feel it at the back rails. We are damned impressed.

A big-headed Michael Jackson dances out to “Beat It” and is encouraged to jerk off. His feeble effort gets his dick lopped off and he sprays a ton of alternating red, green and blue liquid into the audience. In a patriotic display, it becomes red, white and blue all at the same time.

There’s a transvestite space alien, and then a big monster which looks like a giant uterus with pointed teeth in the cervix and two octopus-like ovaries attached by fallopian tubes on either side. The ovaries are sliced off and then a Hitler head comes out of the cervix and does battle with Oderus. He cuts it off. More blood spews.

Finally, the big worm World Maggot, which has been sitting quietly in front of the drum set, comes alive and stretches out. Girls and members of Hose Got Cable are jammed into its jaws, and then the

Maggot is decapitated and there’s more hosing down of the front rows.

This concludes the show, but whatever the encore is normally, we never find out. Something has gone amiss with Brockie’s costume and he rips it off before leaving the stage. When he comes back wearing nothing but the huge dick G-string, the rest of the band has to match him by pulling off their costumes.

Gwar veterans tell me the encore numbers were more Rawg than Gwar, Gwar’s uncostumed counterparts, and it is uncharacteristic for Brockie to break character in a Gwar show. They say he began doing it from the first miscue.

There’s a delay in getting the drummer to return at all. It’s hard to tell whether the anger and frustration on the stage is real or part of the act, but if it was real, that might explain why Brockie pulled off the last piece of his costume and paced the stage restlessly, completely naked, sometimes singing, mostly fulminating, and at one point, pulling a bag of golf clubs and taking a few practice swings.

(I glance across the Flood Zone in a news flash panic and my photographer, having exhausted her allotted time on the perch, has climbed down. Shit!!! She’s on the floor somewhere, her view blocked by uplifted hands. A photographer from France is up there now shooting away. France gets naked photos of Prince Charles and Dave Brockie. This is not fair! It is our punishment for Euro-Disney. I am way too far back to get a clear photo with my dinky camera and the room is still full of smoke from Slymenstra. My worst fears are confirmed when the film comes back a few days later. Brockie is barely discernible in the haze and my negatives are mysteriously missing, so you’re all going to have to take my word on this.)

Did he feel the show had not been up to its usual standards and offered himself like a naked Christ as a human sacrifice to the audience? It was the most amazing dramatic theater ever, and there was almost no response from the floor. Does he always do this?

No, the people around me shake their heads, silent.

Is that his real penis?

Seems like it.

The problem is if you’ve been strutting around for over an hour in a yard long monster dick, suddenly

unveiling your real one is like going from Disney World to Tweetsie Railroad. As penises go, Brockie could win a bronze in the White Boy Olympics. But compared to the satanic majesty of his alter ego organ, it loses something in the translation. When he went to the barricades with this one, no hands reached up to bat it.

What he intended to do next will forever remain a mystery. One of the guitar players is repeatedly yelling that he needs a beer. An empty beer bottle goes flying onto the stage and the band immediately becomes a Kennedy Assassination tableau, all pointing up at us as if we were the Texas School Book Depository.

Hey, it wasn’t us, we point back. It came from down there, the Grassy Knoll, and we all point down. The last thing we would have done is thrown a beer bottle at such a magnificent spectacle. But the band is in an uproar about this Single Bottle Theory that has killed whatever is left of Naked Encore, and they’re convinced it came from upstairs. They’re not going to play anymore, they scream.

Brockie is handed an apron or shirt to cover himself. He announces the cops have arrived, drapes himself, and the show ends suddenly as they scurry off the stage. The people upstairs rush to the windows to see if cop cars are on the street, but there’s nothing.

The place empties out and cool air whooshes through the windows, finally breaking the heat and smoke from Slymenstra’s torches.

“Brett,” I say to the major domo Cassis, who has come in with the clean-up squad. “Did you see that? What was that all about?”

“What?”

“Brockie was naked on stage. Can you do that in Richmond?”

“I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything about it,” he says wisely. “Did you throw the bottle?”

“No! It came from downstairs!” We would never throw a bottle at something we were going to vote for in the polls.

Frank Daniel 1951-2004

This was published in the Richmond Music Journal in April 2004, and I just realized it isn't on the blog, which I started in 2006. Since it looks like at this point in 2013 that the Internet might be a thing after all, I want to post it here so Frank will live on the World Wide Web for people to find him.

Frank Daniel, 53, died at home unexpectedly in March 2004. I met him in 1992 and hung out with him for about nine months, and then we never saw each other again. Around 1997, the Internet was coming into its own and we exchanged a few e-mails until there was nothing more to say that wasn't awkward. I was in a new relationship and had finally moved on.

Early in 2004, he popped up again, placing an ad in this paper for a female vocalist. He was in the process of working up standards and jazz numbers for a new quartet, Satin Doll. Mutual friends said it was going to be terrific. It was his dream band and he was excited about it.

Frank was from Clarksville and moved to Richmond to attend Virginia Commonwealth University the same year I did, 1969. But his mother died soon after he arrived and he had issues with his art teachers, so he quit. He worked on the construction crew that built the Richmond Coliseum and he got involved with the art and music scene that was particularly vibrant and exciting here in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I loved Frank from the moment I heard his deep, resonating voice on the phone. He was editing a small newspaper called Livewire in 1992 and I called in with suggestions. He listened graciously and soon I was writing for him. I’ll never forget the day I went to his apartment for the first time to hand in an article and put a face to that fabulous voice. We watched a praying mantis in his backyard and he launched into a long and thorough history of the species. A few weeks later, I kiddingly called him “Bugboy” and the name stuck. He used it as his screen name years later on AOL, only spelled Bugboi. I guess Bugboy was taken.

He lived on Stuart Avenue when we first met, a few doors down from Buddy’s. His roommate was another musician and Buddy’s bartender, Mic Muller, who was part owner of a new bar called Moondance which would anchor the local music scene’s last great era in Shockoe Bottom. Both Frank and Mic had been in the almost nationally famous band Single Bullet Theory. Frank was in the band when it recorded “Rock Around the Apocalypse” and “Keep It Tight” in 1977 and 1980. They opened for Patti Smith in New York. They recorded in Los Angeles, opened for The Pretenders on a Canadian tour, and toured cross-country with The Ramones and Simple Minds.

He seldom talked about it with me, and when he did, it was with rancor since almost making it in the conniving music industry can be an embittering experience. He had his freelance art and numerous small pick-up bands to keep him busy. As far as I know, he managed to live his life without ever getting a 9 to 5 normal job until just a few years ago when his self-taught graphic skills on the Mac computer landed him a full-time position at GE Financial Assistance (Genworth), which he turned into a part-time job as soon as he could. He was not a work-a- day grind type of guy and knew how to live on a small amount of money.

I once found him a job repairing fine china and figurines and suggested he use his tooth as his resume. He had made his own false tooth, painting it to exactly match the others. He got the job. It didn’t pay much, but he enjoyed the work. Whether he really made his own tooth or it was just a wild story he told me, I don’t know. When he heard I was telling people about it, he was angry, but I didn’t retell it to be cruel, then or now, but to illustrate his remarkable resourcefulness. He made even the most pathetic little apartments in Oregon Hill seem cozy and warm with his music, books and art. He loved movies, British Invasion bands, Stephen King and cooking.

He hated clowns, but painted a lot of them. His meals were works of art. When he moved, he drew floor plans of his next place and placed his belongings. He was so organized, it thrilled me. He was the most engaging conversationalist and best listener I’ve ever met. He was observant and curious, the only person who ever noticed I always sit on my foot when I type. For a decade after meeting him, in my mind, I was always talking things over with him.

The first movie we saw was “Patriot Games.” The last was “Sleepless in Seattle.” Knowing I had sold my Beatle albums not once but twice in my life when I needed money, he made cassettes for me of every Beatle recording, with perfect little covers and each song title hand-lettered. That short time together glows in my memory even though, as he often insistently reminded me, we were not dating.

He had many platonic women friends because he found us amusing, but he fell in futile romantic love with the more insane ones, the Courtney Love types he felt he could save if only they’d give him a chance. They never did, something he bitterly complained about. After his second marriage ended, he had a good job and a nice house in the neighborhood south of the Huguenot Bridge. It was so unlikely a final scenario for him, I thought it must be Bizarro World Frank. I heard he even had a decent car. He had a new girlfriend and now he was getting the band of his dreams off the ground. His life was on the upswing. Is that the best or worst time to die?

Frank, as some people know, is the father of the Richmond Music Journal. I didn’t see him anymore after he met his last wife, and I didn’t like it. I missed him terribly. Livewire had collapsed, so I thought I’d start another paper and he could write for me, like I had for him. I didn’t know a single thing about music, but he was a musician, so the topic was set. He did a couple of articles, but his new relationship and new band, My Uncle’s Old Army Buddys (that’s how it was spelled), were more important. My sad little tributes to him in the paper pissed him off. But the paper thrived even without him, and eventually, I did, too.

Not all my memories are fond ones. Frank was an atheist when I knew him and delighted in turning the cold light of logic on my childlike religious beliefs. Our debates were damaging and debilitating, and now, whenever I desperately need something to believe in, I’m mad at him for tempting me to take a bite of the apple from that damned tree of knowledge. The scientific world is cold and cruel and no comfort when you’re facing your own mortality. I miss Frank, but I also miss my spiritual innocence.

Frank could also rage about my Disneyesque view of life, how I felt inanimate objects and animals had feelings and personalities. Yet I know he loved his cats. Still, he could be chillingly realistic. When his pet reptiles and bugs devoured each other, he shrugged. “That’s what animals do,” while I cringed in horror.

Horror was his thing. We disagreed on the literary value of Stephen King, a man he physically resembled. I was never an “apt pupil” when it came to King. Much of Frank’s art was dark and macabre. He built professional monster model kits. His business was named “Grave New World.”

He had juvenile diabetes, although he didn’t talk about it much. It saved him from the draft, but he also knew he wouldn’t be an old man. He chain smoked Camel Lights. I don’t smoke, but for three years after he left, I smoked Camel Lights, too. The familiar haze was my oasis of despair.

A mutual acquaintance of ours recently told me Frank made him a better musician because he tried harder for him. He wanted Frank’s approval, and just an appreciative glance when he nailed a song made his spirits soar. I knew exactly what he meant. I created my newspaper because I wanted to impress Frank. I wanted it to be better and last longer than Livewire. I wanted him to be proud of me. He inspired me to accomplish things I didn’t think were possible, and in the process, I found my true self. You’d think that would be enough and I wouldn’t care about the other stuff, the stuff that went wrong, the stuff that didn’t happen, but foolishly, I still do, even after all this time. Two days before he died, we were e-mailing about his new band, which I knew I could never let myself go see. I’m sorry every day that I fell in love with him because that kept us from being friends and he was truly the best friend I never had.

That Moment of Somebody Explaining Your Life

"You can never underestimate that moment of somebody explaining your life to you, something you thought was inexplicable, through music. That was the way out of loneliness."

-- Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney

I am one of those people who doesn't need music in my life except for those periods of loneliness, and that has happened twice. Three times if you count the time I rode along with my son's pre-teen loneliness.

The first was my own, so I can tell you things about music between 1964 and 1971. Then my son was born and I turned the radio off. I recognize song titles, melodies, band names, band drama from that period and it brings back fairly pleasant memories.

The second time was his own early years of teenhood, 1983-1988, more or less. It was also when MTV first came into our home and when he wasn't watching it, I would have it on as background music to my housewifery. So I became familiar with Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, and dozens of one-hit wonder bands that had memorable videos to go along with their songs. By the time my son was 16, he took his music to his room and shut the door, so I know Def Leppard was going on, but I wouldn't recognize them if I saw a photo or heard a song. There was also retro things afoot. He was sneaking off to Grateful Dead concerts, more to live in the parking lot than to see the show. I could hear The Doors coming through his closed door, a band I most certainly did recognize.

Then he left home, and I got divorced. I met other people, and things didn't work out, and I entered my second adolescence and profound period of loneliness, 1993-1997, when again I can tell you about bands and band dramas, and recognize songs because I listened to the radio again. I know all about Nirvana and the grunge movement out of Seattle and Oregon, the flannel shirts. The music again explained my life to me, But even more than that, I know about the local bands of that time and their music because I decided -- despite knowing nothing about what had happened locally prior to this, to do a local music newspaper. I know about doing newspapers, and it was the topic that was soundtracking the loneliness of that period. So they came together, and it was pretty good.

That period began to fade away starting in 1997 when I met other people who did work out, and I went back to work full time in the adult world, and turned the radio off again. Things are busy, sometimes too busy, and I don't need my life explained. I have built a little outpost for myself, and my life is the treadmill I am on to sustain it. It's not particularly fulfilling unless you consider maintaining what comforts you have as the mission. The music I sometimes allow back in is from the other periods, just to remember where I was and how I got here.

Like last night I got out of bed because it was suddenly very important that I download Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans." Guthrie explained my life to me during two of my wilderness periods. His "Alice's Restaurant" bookended my college years. I wrote a parody of it for my college newspaper about standing on line at the bookstore at the beginning of the semester that put me on the map as a writer when I was one among thousands of anonymous kids on campus. 

And, as a new divorcee, between jobs, and not knowing what to do next, I attended an Arlo Guthrie concert at the Flood Zone by myself and felt transcended. I felt like maybe I could see a pathway out. We sat in chairs for that show. I thought it was always going to be that civilized. I wanted to write about it, but no one wanted to publish it. This was before the Internet. So I had to start my own newspaper. 

In the Year 2000

Scott Mills wanted to do an interview in 2000 on the history of the Journal, which was 8 years old at the time, and had four more years to live. My recollection is we did the interview as a series of email exchanges. I published it in the paper and had it on the website for awhile. Now it's time to park it on the blog, minus the parts that are no longer true, like Twisters still existing and things like that.

When did the RMJ first hit the streets?

Late in October of 1993

Did you think it was going to last as long as it has?

No, I thought I'd get a real job eventually and lose interest in it, or someone would buy it. I didn't know what the future would hold. At job interviews, they would always ask, where do you see yourself in five years? And I never knew. Maybe that's why I never get the job.

The RMJ is legendary for the battles that took place in its pages. What are some of the memorable ones?

The first one was when we started to go see bands in the Bottom. That pissed off the clubs on Grace Street.

What do you think made the scene change locations?

I couldn't guess. I know what makes me change locations is a bad neighborhood vibe. No parking, running for your life to get back to your car. The second battle was giving the Richmond Music Cooperative's CD so-so reviews. So that crowd hated us. And they were the In Crowd, too. Then everyone who hated the Vapor Rhinos hated us because we liked them. Then everyone who hated girls doing a music newspaper hated us, because most of our writers were girls and we didn't always write about the music. We wrote about the scene.

Let me publicly thank Anne Soffee and Lisa Honeycutt, who both traveled the scene with me a great deal in the beginning. Anne invented the term "toe molecule" for where a musician keeps his personal sensitivity, romanticism and loyalty. They draw on that toe molecule to write music, but they don't live up to their own lyrics. Lisa, especially, took a lot of mean-spirited criticism from the guys for things she wrote. The musicians complain that the RMJ is not supportive, but nothing beat the personal attacks and personal ugliness they dished back. It's always about the music from this end, but they'd hit back at our looks.

I remember the interviews used to ask who the babe magnet in the band was. I always thought that was an unusual question.

It was a 16 Magazine type question. The whole interview was based on that magazine. The next battle was the waitresses at Marvin's, the restaurant across from the Hole in the Wall. They hated us. Marvin's was the scene hang-out. Every time someone famous died, they put up pictures of the dead person immediately. I always wondered how they did that so fast. It was actually a pretty cool place, but I was an interloper to them. Then we wrote about Dave Brockie getting naked at the end of a Gwar show at the Flood Zone. So then the Flood Zone hated us, because that became a part of their liquor license problem, although not the part that lost them their license. But Mike Hsu, who was in Animal Farm and also a deejay on The Buzz, kept badmouthing the paper on the air. So there was plenty of love lost there. And radio hated us because our readers wrote in letters about how much they hated local radio, and we printed them.

What I find really interesting is the RMJ is still a survivor and The Buzz, the Flood Zone, and a lot of those bands no longer exist. Kids today don't even know there was a Flood Zone.

Then everyone who hated Frog Legs hated us, because we liked Frog Legs. Then we didn't think much of the Floating Folk Festival's first CD, so they hated us. Everyone who gets a bad review hates us. I have an enemies list, and people move off it, but it's pretty stable over the years. There's people who write us really, really nasty letters that make personal and untrue accusations about our motivations. There's people who shafted us on money, people who stole things from us, people who tried to start competitive newspapers, people who tried to sue us. That's the spectrum of unforgivable offenses. One woman used to call me repeatedly from North Carolina in the middle of the night and said I was sexually frustrated and dressed in Garanimal outfits. Finally, I read her phone number to her off my caller ID, and she stopped after that. I guess she didn't know Caller ID existed. I still don't know who that was. I wouldn't have minded if she called the phone line I set up for late night calls, the message line. The ringer was always turned off on that phone. It just recorded messages and took faxes. But she would call my personal phone.

The Garanimals outfit is songworthy. Again, all of those start-up papers came and went. Of course, bands wanted as much press as they could get, and would do whatever they could to be in any music paper. Did you have hard feelings toward bands that did things for competitors?

Of course, especially if they bought ads everywhere but the Journal. Or they send hate mail about me to other papers. What's with that? One band bought a display ad in Punchline saying insulting things about me!

What is the most outrageous thing that happened while doing the Journal? 
Getting kicked out of the Metro during a Gwar show. They actually tried to confiscate my camera. I told them I wouldn't take any photos -- photo bans were common -- even though I had the band's permission, but they wanted to take the camera anyway. So I dodged them. And the bouncers kept hunting me down in the crowd. It got scary. They were big guys. I darted in front of the stage at one point and got sprayed down with fake blood. Then I headed for the staircase, a huge bouncer on my heels. I pulled my keychain out. It had a little silver pocketknife on it, and pulled out the blade. If that bouncer had touched me, I really think I would have tried to stab him. I got out with my camera, and ran into Marvin's across the street, looking for my friend, Anne. George Reuther from the Vapor Rhinos was sitting inside and looked really startled when I walked in. I didn't realize I was covered in fake blood. He said he didn't know where Anne was, so I went home and saw myself in the mirror, all fake bloody.

That was an unnerving experience. I also got kicked out of the Flood Zone a couple of time for taking photos of bands, even local bands. That was insane. Then Metro wouldn't let me in even if I was on the guest list. Like I'm so much trouble. Writing about things that happened in the clubs attracted trouble from the ABC agents.

That's really a visual description. That's the one thing I miss about the RMJ, when you stopped writing as much as you did in the early days. Your descriptions were always so visual, it made you feel like you were right there. Did you study journalism?

My degree is in journalism, although I learned more about writing just from reading people I admire, not from professors. I've always been an observer of life rather than a participant.

What's the worst thing that happened?

Having to hire a lawyer for $500 over the Gwar/Flood Zone hearing at the ABC Board. That was a lot of money for nothing, since the Flood Zone lawyers made a deal with the ABC in the hallway moments before and I never had to testify. I had hired a lawyer to explain why I was going to refuse to testify. It's called quashing a subpoena. Brockie was there in a suit with his lawyer, too. And it all turned out to be unnecessary because the Flood Zone owners, just kids, caved. They had done more serious things we didn't know about, so it really wasn't a First Amendment issue. $500 was a huge amount of money to me.

Why did you not want to testify? 
It was a violation of journalism ethics. You can't be subpoenaed to squeal on people when you are reporting a story. That was the basis of the papers we filed in reply. Brockie had taken off his costume before he left the stage, so he was nude on stage for a few minutes, and we mentioned that in the story. The ABC tossed the lewd display charge in with a bundle of other ABC violations they had against the Flood Zone. Even with the lewd charge, they would have lost their liquor license. I don't think Dave or I knew that going in. We both wanted to maintain silence to help the Flood Zone because we both lawyered up. And then the Flood Zone never gave us the courtesy of letting us know they were up the creek anyway.

Oh, in other worst things, I got mugged outside the train station in the Bottom one rainy Friday night. The guy grabbed me from behind and punched me in the head until I hit the ground, took my purse and called me a bitch. It was an older black man, neatly dressed in an Eisenhower jacket. I remember that I kept walking toward him when I spotted him in the shadows because I didn't want to insult him! Make him think I was prejudice because he was black. Like if I turned and ran the other way, it would hurt his feelings.

I was so rattled after it happen, ran around looking for a cop. Finally found one, and he didn't even call it in! It was too routine for him. I lost $25, my credit card, and a camera. The cop finally agreed to go back to the scene with me and shine a flashlight around, and I found my cosmetics purse, but nothing else. I had just come from seeing Suzy Saxon and the Anglos at Alley Katz. I had a black eye the next day. I had to get a replacement driver's license, so I put on layers of makeup to cover the black eye for the photo, and it came out great. Like Glamour Shots. Best license photo I ever took.

I also got hit by car on Cary Street and broke my wrist. I was picking up an article from a girl who worked in a shop there. She told the insurance people I was in a hurry to meet her, so my claim against the driver who hit me failed, and then she went to work for my competition, so she was not a great experience. I still get mad when I see her byline. I did the next paper by putting a pencil inside my cast and typing with the eraser end. Look how resourceful I was, and I still got fired from my job. I was working part-time for a personal injuries attorney. It wasn't good business to have an injured person sitting in your front office, still able to work. That goes against everything personal injury attorneys are about. So I lost my health insurance, too. It took years to get that hand working again without aching or turning numb.

The RMJ is distinctly unapologetic to complainers, and that sets it apart from the music papers that come and go. Where did the your motto "Everybody Hates It, Everybody Reads It" come from?

That's what everyone tells me all the time, so it became the slogan. We don't care what people think because the newspaper has never supported me financially. If you depend on advertising revenue to pay your rent, then you're going to want to please everyone and keep the advertising dollars rolling in. You edit scared. I suspect that's why there isn't that much local coverage in Punchline. The ad revenue has to be protected. But I've never lived off the paper. It pays for itself. If it does well, it gets bigger. If it doesn't, it gets smaller. I don't make calls soliciting ads anymore. I don't have the time. They need so much attention, so many reminders, a dozen phone calls to get their ad in on time, and then two dozen phone calls and two visits to collect the money. I just build the paper around whatever advertising comes in on its own.

I was in Seattle in 1994 and the local music zines were more like the RMJ. What are some of your favorite issues and articles?

When no one knew me and I was in a period of my life when I didn't care what people thought, I wrote better articles. I lived it back then. Went out almost every night and stayed out until the bars closed. Hit five or six places a night. I can't do that now. I enjoyed publishing Killer Montone's work. Mad Dog wrote for us. Ned Scott Jr., Buzzy Lawler. I have a good group now with Robert Stutler, Walter Boelt, Kiki Nusbaumer, The Griper and the Johns. There's two or three Johns. I get them confused. Except for John Church, I've never met any of the current writers. It's all done by email.

You have had a lot of writers and reviewers over the years. At one point you did most of the writing. What made you stop doing as much?

The usual thing that stops women from doing things, a boyfriend. He didn't want to go out every night because he had a full time job, and I didn't want to go out without him. Then when we did go out, it was usually to see his friends play, and they knew me, so it was not easy to review them. If you hate them and write about it, it becomes a dilemma. It's tough to handle the advertising, too, when you're a reviewer. I had to retire.

Lots of your writers use fake names. Why?

They're in bands, so they don't want other bands to know they're reviewing. But most of them are audience members. The one rule I had was, if you must use a fake name, you have to stick with it. You build an identity and become that person.

Has a band ever pissed you off so much, you left them out of the RMJ?

Yep, either they didn't pay for an ad, or they didn't pay my boyfriend when he ran sound for them. Or they complained they only wanted good reviews. All bad reviews should not be published, according to them. Or they were insufferable assholes who fought dirty by taking personal shots at me in other papers. All those guys were banished. It's not a big deal. They probably didn't even notice.

Somehow every music person in town still manages to pick up the RMJ and scoff at why they're not in the polls. Have you ever boosted a band in the polls you really liked, or is it always based on votes?

I vote when I see someone I think is good. If a group is tied, I'll put them in the order I think is most deserving. There's a lot of ties. Second through 10th place are often just single votes.

Word association. Dave Matthews.

I bought "Under the Table and Dreaming." I like some of the songs on that CD. The lyrics are nonsense. What I really hate is bands that try to imitate him. They're always really bad. I have seen him play only once at the Flood Zone and it was so crowded. I took a few photos and left. I interviewed him on the phone before "Under the Table" came out. He was modest and shy and said he really wasn't friends with his band. They barely rehearsed together.

Did you think he would be the mega-sensation he has become?

It's an amazing feat for a band with no sex appeal and not many hit songs. But it's like Phish or the Grateful Dead, I guess.

Cracker.

I bought two of the CDs. I like a lot of their songs. I've seen them twice, at the Flood Zone and at a Plan 9 in-store. They hated our Flood Zone review and sent a lot of pissy mail about it. So I guess we'll never have a Sound of Music ad. Most people who try to start a music newspaper in this town kiss up to Sound of Music hard, do a lot of interviews with their engineers and the bands they're recording. We never cared. Interviews with engineers are dull reading anyway. And interviews with bands who have a new CD out, it's always the exact same story. They worked hard on it. They think it's good. Hope you buy it. Zzzzzzz.

I remember David Lowery wrote a letter to the RMJ about someone saying he did nothing for the local scene. What was that all about? 

A misinterpretation. We said no local band he championed has made it big, or has made it yet. See, even you remember just the misinterpretation from their side, and not the original review or our response. That's how rumors start.

Gwar.

I've seen them four times, and maybe that many times without costumes. I've seen X-Cops. It's always an enjoyable show because, unlike other bands in Richmond, it is a show. Scariens, Frog Legs, Vapor Rhinos, Ultra Bait, Thelma Shook, they all did shows with costumes and themes. You never knew what was going to happen next, and the music was the soundtrack. I'd rather see a show any day. I interviewed Dave Brockie once. He was very entertaining to write about. He gave me Hitler's head to present to The Ramones as a gift since I was going to that show that night.

I'd say the Gwar review that landed you in court was your biggest publicity moment. The local news and Times-Dispatch all mentioned the paper in their stories. MTV reported on it.

And then came the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I felt Brockie understood the paper. It's not like other papers. It didn't do preshow interviews. But since then, no one has mentioned us. (Style never did, even when I finally folded the paper after 11 years, when they would write stories about the end of papers like ThroTTle and Caffeine that didn't last as long.)

Frog Legs.

Their early songs were great, great musicianship. They put on a show. They were characters. They should have made it. I saw them play every week for months, and never got tired of it. They had just started getting a following locally when they went on the college circuit for East Coast Entertainment, and then dissolved. The frat houses did not get them. I asked an East Coast booker once how they were doing, and they said the after-show comments were bad. Then some producer changed their sound for their first CD, and they were blander. The songs didn't sound the same. In the beginning, they used to call my answering machine in the middle of the night and record long, long messages. They'd get on extensions and talk to each other, do skits. That definitely created interest in seeing their show the first time. But they were impossible to interview because they were always in character, always on. They never told the truth or gave a straight answer. Guitarist Tom Illmensee really was the band. People thought it was vocalist Wrenn Mangum, but musicians went to hear Tom play.

Thelma Shook.

I have both their CDs. Dean Owen wrote some of the best songs I ever heard. I still listen to those songs. He is a great vocalist and showman. He should be on the cover of Rolling Stone. Their music was better than Frog Legs, even. Damn near brilliant. He's a musical genius. When they were promoting the first demo tape, I came home one night and found the front door of my apartment building completely decorated in Thelma Shook eyeglasses. They traded me computer software for advertising space, so it was a great deal.

Cover bands.

I don't have anything against them, really. In the beginning I thought they were cheesy, but now, if I am going to be in a bar for four to six hours, I'd just as soon hear some covers. The bands writing truly entertaining originals are few.

One thing I heard about the RMJ was cover bands got treated better than bands that composed their own songs, and it was the bands' writing that got dissed because their songs were not good. But the cover bands avoided that criticism because they played known hits. They were not being judged on how well they played.

Sometimes that's all you have to do to be entertaining, play covers. But that's not true, what you said. We judged cover bands. The Fredds hated us, BS&M hated us. We didn't give all cover bands a free pass.

Original acts.

You mean bands that write all original music or have an original act? You need to be really good before you start playing out. I hate it when a show is like a rehearsal, when everyone stops between each song and has a meeting, when they wear street clothes on stage. If someone has to change a string, the others should play something. It's not smoke break time. Have a plan for technical difficulties.

Moondance.

We had a great deal there. I gave them half-price ads and I always got in free. And they always did an ad. I went there a lot, so it worked out. It was a good room. I like square rooms with tables. I couldn't offer other clubs that deal because I didn't go to the same places every week, but at Moondance, I ate a lot of food, saw a lot of bands. The bartenders, the waitresses, Chuck, everyone was like a family. Chuck always had a joke.

Other music venues.

I used to know all the doormen. When it got to the point where I didn't and had to pay covers, that was a kick in the teeth. I like places with no cover charges because I never know how long I'm staying. I stopped going to the Bottom when the parking situation got ugly. Suddenly, every spot had a man standing there trying to collect $4 in advance. Or they were towing. It became easier to go to the suburbs, a club in a strip mall with plenty of free parking and lights. No homeless people trying to intercept you. But it was also without a soul out there. You didn't run into everyone you knew out on the sidewalks like you did in the Bottom or on Grace Street. That was the beginning of the end.

Memorable bands?

Vapor Rhinos, Frog Legs, Gwar, Dumm Dumms, Thelma Shook, Los 10 Space, Grumbledog, Ultra Bait, Scariens, Princess Tone, Barbie n' Bondage, Dog Psychology, Beex, Peter Bell and his amazing combination of ego and insecurity. My Guitar wrote the best songs and had the worst band name. It was all V.J. Jones, a real talent. He wasn't so good playing out because there was no stage charisma, but his tapes were amazing. I gave away dozens of "Radio and Coffee." People loved it, but the live show would be disappointing. He should have a songwriting deal. I liked Ira Marlowe's solo CD, too. He was before my time, but the work he left behind showed ability.

Ten Ten, The Good Guys, Single Bullet Theory were all before I came along. I've met some of them, seen some revivals and reunions. They fit the context of their time, but their music sounds dated now. The Waking Hours sounded dated before they even got started.

The best show I saw was John Fogerty at the Classic Amphitheatre. That was personally emotional for me. I loved Creedence Clearwater Revival. That was the music I listened to in college, and the first couple of years of college was the last time I had real hope that my life was going to be great. And then it wasn't, but CCR brings back memories of that time.

Dean Owen - A Memoir

I found in my computer this fragment of an interview with Dean Owen, which I did not conduct. I think someone named Chris Brooks might have asked the questions, but it is stream-of-Dean, which needs to be preserved for historical purposes, and I have translated it into English and attached some video to this because, as it turns out, I was in attendance for some of these highlights.

There was a time when I was playing with the Vapor Rhinos at the Metro and Dan-o was in the front row, yelling for us to play “Chinese Rocks.” Both Tommy Rodriguez and Peter Headley turn around and give me a look, but I didn’t know the song, so I just shrugged! Dan-o had a look of total disbelief, dumbfounded, like “how can you not know ‘Chinese Rocks’”? But I hadn’t listened to The Ramones. I didn’t come from that background. That’s why Tommy called me "Dirty Hippie" for years.

With me, it’s never been about genre. I can find things I like about any genre. In those days, it was weed or women for me. My high school hadn’t caught up to punk rock yet. We were still at jocks and freaks. Everyone smoked pot, but you were a freak if you wore it on your sleeve. It was all Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ted Nugent, ZZ Top, Alice Cooper, The Grateful Dead.
I was playing jam band music when I met Tommy. Charlie Brown ran a little reggae bar at the corner of Harrison and Broad called New Horizons. He calls me and says a band called Brown Experience is playing with the Prevaricators and someone else, and the regular sound guy won’t do it because they are awful! So, for 25 bucks and beer, I was mixing me some awful. That’s where I first met or saw all of those guys, Tommy, George Reuther, Dave Brockie, Keith Clarke, Crazy Jimmy.

That night, I watched Crazy Jimmy flick a cigarette into one of those retro greasy car mechanic haircuts and chuck his white ‘70s boot into the mirror ball. The guy with the cigarette in his hair didn’t notice until it was smoking pretty good. I laughed my ass off the entire night. I had already seen and fallen in love with Root Boy Slim, so this was pretty much exactly where I was headed. Loud, often obnoxious, slightly offensive, fun as shit, rock and roll that didn’t take itself seriously!

I continued to play the jam band stuff for a stint, toured with a band from Georgia, even moved to Arizona for awhile. I played with Widespread Panic a number of times and even toured with them, but I was never in the band.

New Horizons caught fire. The Jade Elephant opened. Twisters opened, and Tommy and Peter let me join the Vapor Rhinos! George was the bass player! I think Peter liked me because I was good, but not as good as him! I loved all the crazy shit, the flying penis, the smoke machine, the gutted stuffed animals everywhere, poking fun at everything and everyone, especially the cool people. Packing peanuts, general all-over goofiness, but mostly I really loved the songs! Peter is one funny guy and that is totally reflected in his lyrics, beach me a whale, chocolate mousse, if you can’t cut the mustard, you can cut the cheese. That’s some All-American potty humor at its best! I was all about it!

We played New Year’s Eve at the Red Light Inn in 1994. Aside from George chasing wild, coked up strippers around with a yard rake and a bicycle horn down his pants, the funniest thing to me was the regulars were really upset I was wearing a red, white and blue bikini top. We really didn’t get too out of hand that night because as you can guess, some pretty big bitches work at strip clubs! Not to say we didn’t do any crazy shit, we just didn’t break anything that wasn’t ours to break.

I was actually a DJ at the Red Light. I "spun the hits that shook the tits." Peter loved that one! Lots of funny shit happens at a strip club. The reason they hired me to DJ was because the girls were sick of the idiots loading the juke box with “Girls Girls Girls,” 47 times in a row.

The Pee Patrol used to crack me up, as well. Every night they would stick their heads in and make sure everything was all right. Two officers dressed up in ridiculous disguises would walk through the alleys, trying to bust drunk college students peeing. They would mill around the entrance for 20-30 minutes every night, getting a freebie! That building is now the home of my fellow bandmate and best friend, Ric Withers’ print shop!

The Vapor Rhinos eventually gave me the boot, signed my walking papers, kicked me to the curb, told me to amscray. They shit in a bag, lit it on fire, and threw it on my porch. I’m kidding, kind of. Bands come and go. People come and go. I am still great friends with those guys, and I think the world of them. Peter got me to stop using so many notes on the hi-hat and introduced me to the girls of Ultra Bait, the next band I was in. Tommy taught me how to tongue kiss! George gave me one of his gonads. I love all of them and now they kick ass with just two and don’t need nobody else.

Ultra Bait was super fun, my first chick band. We rented a practice space downtown the first summer. It was a Salvation Army storage building. The Cashmere Jungle Lords had a space there. The place was originally a school and our space was the shower and locker room area. It was hot as hell, so there was a lot of almost naked rehearsals. I loved that part! Peter introduced me to them and one night a few weeks later, in Carytown, a girl dressed as a hot nurse comes bounding across the street in the pouring rain, carrying a guitar amp, slips and falls, smashing the amp right in front of me. I got out of the car, helped her up, and it’s Carmen. She is a lot upset. So I told her I would get my amp from home and she could use it. I watched them play with this drummer they called Jiffy Pop.

He was awful, truly awful. His beats were sporadic and irregular like the sound of Jiffy Pop on the stove. I told Tammie they should let me play, and they did! That lasted a couple of years.  With me, it’s not really about genre or anything other than I like you and you like me. I can’t handle playing music with someone I don’t like. No matter how much money or anything else you get! I explode eventually and destroy it all!

Thelma Shook was one of those bands. We were all teenage friends way back, with the exception of the drummer, and now we were together again to give it another try. We had just recorded an EP with Mark Miley at Glass Hand that was getting attention. We had enough money and material to put out a CD, and then…I exploded. The band was practicing at my house. The bass player was living with me, behind on his rent and not giving a shit, eating my food, not cleaning up his cat shit, drying his stinky ass fish socks on the radiator and gassing everyone out of the house. We broke up. Ric and I carried on without them. Hell, we wrote all the songs anyway.

We recorded the CD with Mark again, this time at Montana studio. Everyone from Harry Gore to Tim Harriss played on it, Sherrie Blanks, Tommy Rod, Tom Illmensee, 27 people in all. That was a lot of fun! Then we put together a new band to play out. It was pretty much straight up pop-rock. We dug it. Ric let me do whatever I wanted, so I got to be all campy and goofy again with giant, inflatable dolls, space costumes, lots of fun! The Rt. 1 South show was super fun with Mark Miley on drums and Cheez playing bass. There’s a funny as hell video on YouTube of another show, opening for Beex at Moondance and Tommy is heckling us throughout the set. You can’t mistake us, we are the guys dressed like sailors! The rhythm section was Bobby Jorgenson and Chip Farnsworth. It’s great to see how uncomfortable those guys get when I start making with the gay sailor jokes.

Bands come and go. I have been in more than 50. Bay of Pigs is a stoner metal band I am singing for. They wrote all the songs and arrangements. I just do the screaming. I really like not being in charge. It’s nice to come back to. The other guys are half my age and full of piss and douche, so they aren’t afraid to tell me what sucks and what doesn’t. I love that shit.

Brown Sabbath sprung from Ultra Bait. Mr. E.T. Snyder, El Presidente, came up with it. He put it together with Ryan Lake on guitar, Denny Cable on vocals, and me on drums. He told me he heard Bill Ward in my drumming, but I think it was more that I had a good practice space. Truth is – and this harkens back to the Ramones thing – I had never listened to Black Sabbath until I was asked to be the drummer in a Black Sabbath cover band! I had the first record on vinyl and that’s it. Skillet actually set me straight on how to play that shit.

Other musicians will give you shit about playing in a cover band, but it doesn’t bother me. Bill Ward is a kickass drummer, so if someone says I play his music, great! I take it as a big compliment. I wouldn’t say Brown Sabbath is a tribute band, though, not in the sense of Zoso or Mister Crowley. We don’t dress up or duplicate a record or performance. There is a lot of us in it, sometimes whether we want it there or not. Ryan Lake was the original guitarist and he is friggin' amazing. He left to play with Alabama Thunder Pussy. Frank Jackson took over and promptly fell off a roof and compound-fractured his arm. Ryan came back one more time to play the Frank’s Hospital Stay Benefit at the Canal Club. It has been Frank ever since. We all really enjoy it, still, every time. I doubt we will ever completely stop.

It’s always great to play on a nice stage like The National, with a great PA and someone competent to run it. Always! When you play mostly low quality stages and basements with mediocre PA systems, a nice stage stands out. But in this town, music venues are held captive by outdated and idiotic ABC regulations. Everyone knows it.  You have to sell 15 slices of shitty pizza so you can drink a beer and watch a band in Richmond. I don’t understand why outside investors don’t do a little scouting before opening a big-ass, never going to pay for itself club in this town. Why were there 12 security guys at a Brown Sabbath show? How much does that cost? This town can only float a smaller venue. Why do they make them so big? For half the money, you could equip and run a great, local music venue, even with the inane regulations. I believe you could stay afloat. It takes a good deal of work, and by more than one person, but I’ve seen it done. Dreams of the lottery….

I am not a good Iggy Pop. I look like Iggy, but as Danny and Chester can tell you, my voice is awful! But the band Iggy Plop is fun and funny. The other band members don’t like the name Iggy Plop! They don’t think it’s cool! That cracks me up. I like playing music that I like with musicians I like, whether it’s my music or someone else’s. I don’t care, as long as it’s fun. I am not what you call a looker, and you wouldn’t know it from watching me on stage, but I am shy, so I do this whole music thing just to meet girls! Oh, and maybe smoke a little weed! Hang out with my friends! I am such a douche!

Last Testament - Page Wilson

Page Wilson's last general email.

Took a pretty rough fall a bit over 4 months ago, when my knee went out (again), and dropped me on the "step stone" in my front yard.  FYI a step stone is a roughly 2 X 3 foot kinda squared, roughly 10 inch high, flattish piece of granite, where in times past you would pull your buggy up to so the passengers could disembark without taking that long step into the mud! Or something like that. Obviously, my property was something more than a house in days gone past. What type? Haven't a clue, but have heard some juicy rumors. Only the step stone remains. I thought it was actually pretty cool, until the night of the fall. But it will remain right where it is. Never know when another buggy might show up, eh?

So, some things have changed around the home base of our radio/musical Swamp. I broke my left shoulder, sprained something in my back, and still have a left knee that threatens to drop me again if I'm not a really good boy. It hurts to walk and, for the moment, to play the guitar; but that must change as I heal. I have a couple of good doctor friends who are trying to make some things happen, and I'm going to do my best to be a good, patient, patient. Try that without health insurance or money, and you'll have an idea of where I am today. And that's why I'm sending this missive out to you.

As I've talked to some close compadres about the pending hospital/recovery/operations situation, almost everyone said I should let the folks on my mailing list know what was happening, and see if some could help. I fought writing this email to you, because I don't like to ask for help. For me. Helping other folks is second nature in my very unique, blessed position as a singer-songwriter/radio producer/musical performance organizer/whatever. Now I find all that could be in jeopardy, so am going to suck up my pride, and just lay it out there. That's what they told me to do.

Brutal honesty, when you haven't been able to work for four months, things get a little slim. I'm on the verge of losing my house to foreclosure. It's not only where I feed the dog, but also where the Out O' the Blue Radio Revue is produced. Am also barely keeping lights on, and the water running.

If the dog is hurt, the sled don't run. And this dog is hurt right now.  Ideally, I would be able to add a few sponsors to the radio program, and get through this. But folks are scared in this economy. And for the moment, me, too.

So. I write you tonight to just up and ask if you might be able to help.  Our fine radio station doesn't pay me to do the program, but they give me the two hours to spend with you weekly, and play the wonderful music we are so blessed with. So, with this missive, I am hoping you might have a few bucks you might invest in the Swamp, and keeping Page Wilson and his brave crew of volunteers functioning in close to our usual manner, bringing you radio, and live music, and whatever else we can think of.

I don't send you this lightly. These are desperate times here, and I need your help. 'Nuf said. Thank you if you can help, but if you can't, I understand. Times are rough all over. I just don't have anywhere else to turn right now. The banks won't touch me. Heh, heh. The new mailing address is below.

Thank you. Take care.
Pg

Sent November 26, 2010

Adam Lambert at The National

The line outside The National at mid-morning.

Concert going is a commitment. There's serious fans who know how the game works, and then there's the clueless. Like me.

The serious fans began gathering outside The National early in the morning before Adam Lambert's concert on Aug. 27. There were at least 20 in lawn chairs out on the sidewalk when I came to work around 8:30. By mid-afternoon, there was a couple of hundred. By the time I got off work, the line was down the block.

A co-worker wanted to go with me instead of my husband, who would have been more cooperative. She didn't want to stand on line. Our original plan to hang out at Gibson's and go through the get-in-early underground door was nixed because there was a line to get into Gibson's. So it was 7 p.m. before we joined the line, which was then halfway down 8th Street.

Lines really aren't ordeals, at least to me. You have a good time talking to other people, finding out what lengths they have gone to be there. The weather was great. I could have handled a three-hour line. It's like a community and everyone has a story.

A white limousine pulled up and a man got out with a gaggle of older women who looked like they had just come from sitting on a patio. Even with a limo, they had to join the line down on Marshall Street, literally around the block from The National.

After 7, National bouncers came down the line shouting that everyone should have their own ticket in their hand, and we began to move forward. I noticed the man behind me had an Internet print-out. I asked him if that was his ticket. He said he hoped so, because it was all he had. His mother had already been taken inside because she was in a wheelchair. And she was 70 years old!

"This is all she wanted for her birthday," he said. "She wanted to see Adam before she died. She thinks he is the next Elvis."

American Idol Adam -
Not Performing This Year

That comment brings us to the Problem of the Two Adams. There is the openly gay, dangerous, kind-of-goth Adam who first emerged nationally at the American Music Awards. Then there is the American Idol Adam who did indeed look and act like the second coming of Elvis, a clean cut, handsome, possibly straight Adam who sang well-known cover songs in a rich, thrilling voice and wore impeccable, beautiful suits. I suspect many of the old ladies and children in the crowd were expecting to see American Idol Adam, but a smaller, more intense group of old-school, Ann Rice type goths were hip to the real Adam. They were also the ones who knew you had to get there early if you wanted to stand near the stage.

And sure enough, when the show started and hands went up in front, almost all of them were wearing fingerless black gloves.

Considering our position several hundred back in the line, my friend and I were very lucky to find two seats together at all, but they were in the next to the last row in the balcony. It was a nice enough view of the stage if you don't mind that the people on it look an inch tall. Despite buying a ticket and investing half a day to see this concert, my view was 100 times better watching fan videos on YouTube the next day. That made me grumpy. I seldom go to concerts. This time I made an effort, but not enough of an effort to actually make it an unforgettable experience. Next time I will know.

I got even grumpier as the next 90 minutes transpired. It takes a couple of hours to settle in a sold-out house when there's no assigned seats. In the balcony, people did what people do, kept leaving single seats between each group. The ushers had to urge everyone to fill in the empty seats so the latecomers could sit together. Then there was no room to seat even later arrivals together, and they had to be broken up. We heard their displeasure. Then the still later arrivals who expected to sit, not stand, got into insisting-matches with the poor ushers, who had to comb the balcony looking for volunteers to give up their seats and move to the floor. No one did.

The unremarkable Alison Iraheta finished her short opening set and the lights came up for intermission. We got a second wave of people looking for seats in the balcony. These were moms and dads with little kids moving upstairs after realizing during Alison's set that the kids were too short to see the stage. There was no way they were going to successfully push their way through the determined goths in front of the stage so that American Idol Adam could meet their cute kids, who were actually wearing matching, spangled dance recital costumes. American Idol Adam wasn't doing this show anyway.

I don't know where these super late seniors and parents with recital classes in tow ended up sitting, but kudos to the bouncers at The National for handling all the drama without going crazy. And they stopped people from standing along the mid-balcony rail and blocking my view. And thank you to my fellow old people in the balcony for not standing up through the whole show so I didn't have to.

After the audience sang along with "Don't Stop Believing," waving their arms in the air -- so cheesy -- and a snippet of "Billie Jean," the lights finally went down again and there was another extended wait as the audience sang along with Adam's "For Your Entertainment" like a rehearsed chorus. That was a unifying moment that swept away my irritation. His silhouette finally appeared, in voodoo garb, at the top of a little staircase, and I forgot all about how annoyed I was at being sardined with a thousand demanding people.

Singing "Soaked"

His show is well rehearsed and does not go off script. Even when he seems to be talking to the audience, he's actually performing a lead-in to the next song set. Like a stage play, it doesn't stop. They filled in a pause for a costume change with pulsing music and multi-colored lasers bouncing all through The National.

He does songs from his album. One was "Soak," sang alone on the stage, stunning in a long coat, with possibly just keyboards for accompaniment. He is very tall. His voice was so gorgeous. That was the highlight for me, even though it was a song I had not paid much attention to on the CD.

The rest of the time, four dancers gyrating on stage made it far more entertaining a show than just a singer at a mic with a band playing behind him. Adam sang, he danced, he changed outfits. He was tall. He kissed his guitar player. He was fab. Yes, he is the next Elvis, and the next Liberace, and the next Michael Jackson, and the next Liza Minnelli.

Concerts have changed. Fifteen years ago when I used to attend a dozen a month as a reporter, you had to beg the management to let you bring in a camera, and half the time you were refused. And if you took a camera in anyway, you got ejected. Now there's video cameras all over the room recording the show. I guess they don't even try to ban them. On YouTube, you can follow Adam's concert up and down the United States, and it looks and sounds just like the show at The National. Here's a really good video of my favorite moment from the Knoxville show, uploaded by Needacoke. All her/his videos are good.

The stage door line early in the day.

All day a cluster of 30 or so had stood guard at the stage door on 7th Street, waiting for Adam to go in, and after the show, the crowd had tripled, waiting for him to come out. I could tell from my Twitter feed --- where I followed everyone I could find who said they were going to the Richmond concert -- that he came out about 90 minutes after the show and briefly signed a few autographs before getting on the bus. There were even groupies, but they looked like woeful hookers from the '70s with their spiked heels and micro-mini skirts. Did they really think they had a shot at getting on the bus to give blow jobs? Probably not this night.

Permission to Kill Yourself

In Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, there is a fascinating study about how suicides of prominent personalities set off chain reactions of suicides, as if the first gives permission for the others to do likewise.

I never met or interviewed Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and wasn't a fan of his music, which I found mumbly. News reports say he shot himself in the heart while drinking with friends after a series of text messages he exchanged with an unknown party upset him.

Going through old interviews with Linkous, I found one where he said he was deeply influenced by the Charlottesville writer Breece D'J Pancake, who shot himself in the head in 1979.

Reading Pancake's biographical notes, I found he, in turn, was a big fan of Phil Ochs, who hanged himself in 1976.

It's like each gave the next one permission. For what? To prove you are artistic, or too deep or troubled for this world, or too romantic a figure? Does this somehow validate your art? What in the world makes you blow yourself away?